Route Finding in an Unfamiliar Building

This was a semester-long group project from fall 2006 at Georgia Tech. We looked at the task of finding one's way to a lab or office in the maze-like GVU center in Tech Square research building.

The floors of TSRB all look the same, and each floor has four doors with no indication of which offices are behind each. Labs are frequently unmarked or incorrectly marked, so even if you've found the right place you may not know it. There is a kiosk that allows visitors to look at maps of the building, but there are many problems with it including incorrect map orientation relative to the building and lack of labels indicating what the kiosk actually does.

We did many types of analysis, including functional flow charts, decision-action diagrams, task analysis, function allocation, and workload analysis. These analyses can all be found in the paper. Through these analyses we also discovered problems with workload and function allocation. Almost all of the tasks of navigating through the building are currently allocated to the visitor. The visitor may look up locations on a map, but then they must figure out how to get to that location from their current position, remember those directions, remember the location (and perhaps room number) of the destination, and continuously figure out where they are relative to the room and whether they are on track.

In addition to modifications to the kiosk, we suggest that the visitor be given a PDA that gives directions to a destination based on the visitor's current location. We initially considered some other guiding option like a robot or projected lights, but we determined that the PDA gives the user the most flexibility and is the least intrusive.

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